Well, it’s one month later, and I’ve finished strong. The defense of the project went well, and I got some great feedback. Carl DiSalvo considered my ideology methodology a good first pass and suggested expanding upon it. I hope to do this in the future, but part of the problem was that the ideology axis was actually more a measure of partisanship. So I’ve changed that axis to partisanship. I also changed my methodology for determining partisanship slightly but will discuss this in the soon to come Methodology section.

I’ve added a lot more viewing options, the ability to show or hide the network. But I’ve realized that I need to reconsider the collision algorithm or just abandon it all together. It just causes too large of performance hit, especially if you’re also drawing an extensive network and labels. I’m going to instead consider a “jitter” function, which wound add some noise to each circle’s location with each button press.

But overall, the project has a very solid base. In the next week, I will be migrating the project to it’s new home at clearcongressproject.com. Posting might be limited this week, but look for the Methodology section and other updates to the structure of the blog.

A final thanks to my advisors on the project, Ian Bogost, Carl DiSalvo and Jannet Murray. My experience in the DM program has been life altering and was good to have access to such great minds throughout this sometimes rocky process.